Presidential Transitions: What We Did

October 30, 2000

Transcript prepared from a tape recording

Moderator:	Thomas Mann, Senior Fellow, Brookings Institution
Panelists:	Richard V. Allen, Senior Fellow, Hoover Institution
	Annelise G. Anderson, Research Fellow, Hoover Institution
	Martin Anderson, Senior Fellow, Hoover Institution
	Jack H. Watson Jr.
Introduction:	David Brady, Hoover Institution
	John Raisian, Hoover Institution

Proceedings:

[Tape 1, Side 1.]

MR. RAISIAN: Well, ladies and gentlemen, welcome to our afternoon panel. I'm John Raisian, Director of the Hoover Institution. And we've embarked on a little team project and Dave Brady will expound on that more than me, but with the Brookings Institution and the American Enterprise Institute too, we've gotten some funding from the Pew Charitable Trusts to embark upon thinking about transition to government. And what we do know for certain is that we have a transition coming up. What persuasion transition seems to be still up in the air.

And so this is, there have been a series of these kinds of panels, one being here, but others being at AEI and Brookings as well as in Washington, and it's good to get some of these guys out of the beltway and talk about some of these activities in a setting here on the West Coast. So I want to thank Tom Mann and Norm Ornstein and David Brady who have been the three principals who have tried to organize some of these activities.

So without really delaying beyond that, let me introduce to you David Brady.

MR. BRADY: I won't be very long, but this project, as John mentioned, is the Pew Transition to Governing Project--no, I'm fine--and Hoover--so one of the basic problems is essentially this. There's a difference between campaigning and governing. And some transitions that go from the campaign and winning and then to governing have done so quite well and others have not done so well. And so while this transition to governing project has other aspects of it. And I'm going to introduce Norm Ornstein of AEI to talk a little bit about that.

I just wanted to say that Hoover appeared to be the ideal spot to do a transition, Presidential transition because we have so many senior scholars who have been actively involved in exactly such a transition and among the more successful transitions. So the purpose of today's panel is to try and figure out exactly why certain transitions went well and others did not go particularly well and Hoover seems to be a good spot to do that.

Now, briefly to tell you just a little bit more about the Pew Charitable Trusts and the Transition to Governing Project, I give you Norm Ornstein from the American Enterprise Institute.

MR. ORNSTEIN: Thank you, Dave, and thank you, John, and Hoover for putting today together.

We started a couple of years ago with a sponsorship of the Pew Charitable Trusts a larger project called Transition to Governing. We decided that we needed to bring together a variety of forces from across many elements of the political spectrum. So Tom Mann and I--Tom at Brookings, I at AEI, joined together with John Raisian and Dave Brady here at Hoover, embarked on a project designed to do several things.

We live in the era of the permanent campaign. And it has become increasingly clear over the last several years that what used to be, at least some level of separation with an election, you campaigned, had an election, made choices, and then returned to the business of governing, has been lost. That separation no longer exists. And not only does the separation no longer exist, but campaigning has begun to crowd out governing throughout this process.

As we entered this election cycle, we hoped that we could begin a process of getting more sensitivity to the campaign itself to the importance of governing as a prelude for, perhaps, tilting the balance a little bit the other way. That's been one goal. And we have focused very much on that in the last year and-a-half in a host of ways, including a series of nine sessions which we held both in Washington and at the two party conventions which we called "How Would They Govern?" We did four during the primary season on the four major candidates for the major party nominations, McCain, Bradley, Bush, and Gore. Then we did two others once the nominees were clear on foreign policy, two more broadly on domestic policy and we had a ninth session on the two of them, how Bush or Gore would govern, right before the first Presidential debate which we did at the Kennedy Library up in Boston.

We've worked with journalists to try and get them to ask the right kinds of questions. Generally during a campaign you get all kinds of questions looking at the narrow issue positions of candidates, fine tuned as much as we can, or on character which we seem to have defined as what substances did you or did you not ingest in your formative years, but not many questions about whether candidates know how they would govern in a system where they do not dominate or dictate power, how they would prepare to govern.

That's a prelude for the second element of this project, which is to look at, focus on, and we hope improve the transition itself, which, of course, begins on November 8th this year, and is a reasonably brief window before the actual process of governing begins. This session today is one of the major elements there. We can look at previous transitions, see what worked and what didn't and see if we can draw some lessons for the future. And we are also going to focus on the whole process of nominating and confirming appointees to executive office. Which almost anybody who has ever been involved with it would agree is seriously out of whack.

When John F. Kennedy became President, it took an average of two months for his appointments to cabinet and subcabinet positions to take office. For the Administration of George Herbert Walker Bush and Bill Clinton it took almost nine months, a sixth of the Presidency was gone before a team is in place. We hope to overcome these things as well.

We are joined today, as well, by John Fortier, he is our project director in Washington. I should note that none of the institutions involved in the project endorse any candidates. We are trying to improve the process of governing. And we'll begin that today I hope right now with the first panel led by Tom Mann of the Brookings Institution on how the 1980 and '88 transitions went. Tom?

MR. MANN: Thank you very much, Norm. I'm delighted to be here at Hoover today. My thanks to John Raisian, David Brady, Moe Fiorina.

As Norm said, this is part of a larger project that we'll eventually stretch three years. And this event today is part of a series of events occurring from last Wednesday through the end of today. On Wednesday at AEI we released the volume Preparing to be President: The memos of Richard E. Neustadt, which was our opportunity to reflect with Dick Neustadt in his advising of Presidents Elect over the course of the years. On Friday we released The Permanent Campaign and its Future. And today, happily, we are having an opportunity to draw on the wisdom and experience of the people who have been through a number of transition periods.

Now, transitions in recent years have not gotten the attention they have deserved. I suppose all it takes is a successful one, like in 1980, for everyone to put their guards down and forget about transitions, and then an unsuccessful like we had in 1992 to get everyone interested in them once again. But it turns out that this period of time is crucial in setting the tone and organizing a new administration and a new congress.

Sometimes one imagines, might imagine that transitioning within a party, that is from a President to a new President but without any party change is, is a piece of cake, and not really much of a challenge. But I think you will hear from our panelists that would be a mistake to imagine transitions within parties are simple. In some respects, they're more challenging, more complicated, more difficult to manage than inter party transitions. But we have here people with experience in the between party, inter-party transitions 1976, 1980, 1992, and the most recent important within party transition, that is from Ronald Reagan to George Bush in 1988.

As John Raisian said, we don't know what situation we will have the day after the election. In fact, we don't even know if we'll know the results of the election the day after election. I'm told in Washington State the liberal absentee ballots by mail can be postmarked midnight of election day, which means they may not be received and counted for three or four, or knowing the U.S. Postal Service, weeks after the election. But alas, we are going to have a transition, intra-party with Al Gore or inter party with George Bush. And we thought it would be important to begin discussions of how one might prepare for and think about transitions.

Now, there's sort of a rule with transitions that says the visibility of pre-election transition planning is inversely related through its impact on the transition between the election and inauguration. Presidential candidates are notoriously nervous about any word seeping out that they're actually engaged in what I would call responsible activity, that is planning for the transition that begins once the election is announced. But they are superstitious and therefore neither the Bush campaign nor the Gore campaign will acknowledge any planning. But, in fact, there are senior people that have been assigned to these tasks that they're beginning to try to distill the experience of past transitions. And I think our efforts to discuss models of successful and unsuccessful transitions can play a constructive role in that process.

Now, one of the things Dick Neustadt emphasized on Wednesday, was the importance of tailoring a transition to the person, to the President-elect, the specific person into the context of his election and the likely situation he will, he will face. There are some generalizations one can make about transitions, but alas, it's always important to keep the principle front and center to make sure that the transition is designed to accomplish the objectives of the President-elect, to buttress his strengths and compensate for his weaknesses, and in general, make likely that his objectives can be realized.

Now, Dick Neustadt was also quick to point out the hazards of transitions. He identified them as hubris, ignorance, and time pressured. Hubris because this person has just been elected President of the United States. Who could possibly tell him anything? Ignorance because there's nothing like being in the Oval Office as numero uno. Being Texas, Governor of Arkansas or California or Texas or Georgia or even being Vice President of the United States is not the same thing. And the time pressure goes without saying.

Assembling a White House staff and department heads, setting up procedures for getting a subcabinet in place, prioritizing one's campaign promises, nursing and feeding the press, initiating contacts with Congress, planning a first three or four months, and enlarging the public image of the President-elect are all important tasks during this transition period.

We are about to engage in a conversation with you about these matters. What are the major obstacles to a successful transition? Are there certain structural or organizational features that can be put in place that decrease the likelihood of success? What kind of characteristics should Presidents-elect look for in choosing their transition leaders and directors? What are the consequences of a good transition and what are the costs of an unsuccessful transition?

Those are some of the questions we're going to be asking. Our format will be to have each of our panelists offer some initial remarks, five minutes, stretching maybe to seven. Then we will have a conversation amongst ourselves, and then move to questions from the floor, bringing it all to a close for this first session by 2:30. You have on your seats the biographies of our panelists.

And I won't waste precious time by telling you what you already know. They're all very well known to you. Three of the four have affiliations with Hoover. Richard Allen, who has served in a number of administrations, brings insight about '68 and '80 and '88, among others. Annelise Anderson, again, one of your colleagues here at Hoover who spent time in the transition into the first Reagan Administration. Marty Anderson, also of the Hoover Institution, who played a key role in launching the Reagan Administration. And Jack Watson, who was present at the beginning of the Carter Administration, and a key player in that transition in '76. But also was an important transition figure in moving from Carter to Reagan in 1980.

With that, I think I'm going to begin chronologically. I could go back to Dick Allen in '68, but since our focus is on this '80 and '88, I would ask Jack Watson to open up with some initial remarks.

MR. WATSON: Thank you. Thank you, Tom.

One thing is for sure and it is that the chief operating proposition for a transition planner, for transition planners should be a process of exclusion. There is so much pressure coming from so many places and so many people on so many issues, to have those issues and people and subjects on the President's agenda, that if you are to be successful in setting the new administration off to a good start, a running start, is a phrase that Ed Meese likes to use, you have to exclude, you have to set priorities, you have to focus very sharply on what is most important for the new administration, the new President, and his team.

In some cases those issues will be forced onto his agenda. They will be externally imposed on him as the new President. In other cases, they are his own initiatives, which because of what he has said, positions he has taken, subjects he has advocated as a candidate for the Presidency, are on his agenda because he put them there. But my first, my first word of counsel, as someone who has been through two transitions, one going in, one coming out--a footnote to say, it's a lot more fun going in--is that if you're to do your job, focus. Be prepared to say no. Be prepared to say that's important but it's not something that the President, the new President must deal within the first three or four months of his administration, six months at the outside.

You're not planning for a whole administration in a transition, in a successful transition. You're planning for a successful launch of an administration. Because of the shortness of time, I'm going to watch my five to seven minutes here.

Let me just tick off some things without much elaboration. The President-elect is no longer a candidate, don't act like a candidate anymore. Don't talk like a candidate. Don't posture like a candidate. As a matter of fact, my advice to the new President-elect that we'll see in another eight days is lower the temperature, step back, take a breath, be magnanimous. Whoever wins, be magnanimous. Be inclusive. Reach across the partisan line. Reach out to the whole country. Speak to all the people who didn't vote for you. Raise their level of comfort. Raise their level of confidence in you as the new leader.

Keep this in mind, this image, if you will. We're in a boat. We're out in a vast sea of water that can be indescribably turbulent. And in a Presidential election we are deciding who will take the helm of the life boat. Once we've decided who it will be, everybody in the boat needs to do everything they can within the limits of their positions and places and powers to help the new President be a success. I feel that way if it's to be George Bush, I'm a Democrat, but if George Bush is to be our President, I want him to succeed.

Second, in the same sense that you're not a candidate, you're also not President. There's only one President of the United States at a time. So one terribly important lesson for the President-elect and all of his people to understand and to incorporate into everything they do and say and think is that the President-elect will not be the President until January 20th, you know, in this case 2001. So take care not to intrude, not to interfere. My own advice would be not to criticize, not to debate. The campaign is over.

Next, it's such a, it's such a truism, it's such a self-evident proposition that we don't give it its importance. As important as the persons of the President and the Vice President are, all of us understand that the success of an administration is achieved by scores, I would say, hundreds upon hundreds of people.

Therefore, one of the first orders of business for the President-elect is to set into motion, hopefully with prior planning preceding his transition period, who he is going to appoint to serve in his Administration. We'll talk more about this, I'm sure, as we go through this afternoon. The confirmation process, the appointments process has become savage. To say that it is a delayed exercise understates the difficulty and the importance of what has happened to us here.

So the President-elect needs to do everything he can to get his appointments up, get them vetted, get the FBI checks done, get them to the Congress, and be prepared. I would also say that it's, it's very important for the President early on, I would say, almost immediately to designate his, his key White House Staff, the people around him who will be managing the process, certainly the director of the transition, as I was in 1976 and then again in 1980 for the incumbent President to the President-elect. But the White House press secretary, the President-elect needs to have someone delegated with the responsibility of speaking quietly, staying out of the President's way, but to the extent that someone needs to speak, that person needs to be designated.

I'll stop there. There's so much more to say. There's so many other subjects to address. But at the bottom of it all, right now on October 30, 2000, we're on the threshold of another Presidency. All of us should gather ourselves and our support for whoever that next President is going to be.

MR. MANN: Jack, thank you very much, a wonderful launch to our discussion.

Annelise Anderson?

MS. ANDERSON: I was involved in the 1968--is this thing working alright--transition, and also in 1980 with Ronald Reagan. And I think that the critical thing that determines the success of a transition is whether or not the elected, the President-elect has clear policies that can be adopted and followed and used in Presidential selection and in telling secretaries who are designated for the cabinet what they're expected to do in interviewing them, and so forth.

There are some 3,000 jobs to be filled in the new Administration that are appointed positions. Some of them are secretaries to other people, and of that nature. But there are, nevertheless, some 3,000 that come out in a book, called the Plumb Book, which--and they are Presidential appointments and there are also some agency appointments. Selecting people is an enormous task. And obviously there are, there are a great many people from the States, from people who played various roles in your campaign, from the--from previous administrations of the same party who ought to be considered and eligible who may want to work, various people are recommending.

I think that in 1980, the computer system that we had that we could access to call up people who had been recommended for different jobs or with different characteristics, we had about 40,000 names in that. And if you simply depend on who you know and chatting with people, you leave out huge quantities of people who deserve to be considered, huge categories.

They're not all of equal importance. And looking at what jobs you want, I'll give you an example, Ronald Reagan wanted to pass tax cuts, he wanted to change the budget, cutting or reducing or controlling some things and increasing and spending. And in another area he had a couple of critical things. For example, the Secretary of Transportation in 1980 faced two problems, one was an air traffic controller strike, and something else, something that the Secretary of Transportation designate very much wanted to do, which was to sell Conrail. Those--the legislation involved in those things and the preparation for those things needed to be done virtually immediately so that that legislation could be passed in the summer while the President would still have something of a honeymoon. If that had not been done by then, we would not have been able to proceed with tax cuts and changes in Conrail that made it possible to sell that big railroad later.

And so it's important to look at the policies. For instance, I would say George Bush would be interested in his education program of getting someone in there who is going to be able to design and carry forward that legislation. There is no concern in a transition that the government will not run. The government will always run. And there will always be an acting secretary, acting--everything that's needed to be acting will be there. The problem is, there won't be any new direction in policy if you don't fill these positions.

Ed Meese, who will be talking to you later on, defined very clearly the criteria. I was--I had three cabinet departments that I helped to get the names together, helped staff really. And then that went to a group of people who advised the President and the President ultimately made those selections. But Ed set up the criteria. And he can talk to you more about that later. But one of those criteria was support for the policies of the President-elect in the area in which the person was being considered for a job. They don't have to agree with everything, but they have to support the President-elect. If the President is for tax cuts and they're going to be in that area in Treasury, then they have to be for tax cuts. Have competence to do the job, since mere support does not mere competence. Integrity, which is obviously a potential disqualifier, but we would expect people to have integrity. And basic loyalty to the administration.

The secretary's--secretary designate interviews these people, but they should not be the sole selector of these people. These are Presidential appointments and they ought to--they should be loyal to the President and not merely to the secretary of the department for whom they work. Nevertheless, they have to work with that person in that environment.

It is an enormous task and there is an enormous amount to do. If you know what you're trying to do and where you're going and what your policies are, it isn't entirely--it's a lot of work, but it's not impossible to make decisions. So I would say that a good transition is almost entirely dependent on knowing what the policies are that the President-elect is interested in achieving. Thank you.

MR. MANN: Thank you very much, Annelise.

Marty Anderson, next.

MR. ANDERSON: Thank you. Every time I think of a transition I'm reminded of the story of a little barking dog that used to chase all the cars that went by his house and one day the car stopped and he caught it. And when you look at the transition, let me try a little simple mathematics. We always talk about how difficult they are. You got about 70 days, you translate that in hours, you look at each day, you give a person 5, 6 hours of sleep, got to bush his teeth, got to eat, various things, you have to drive to the office, drive back. So let's say they work 14 hours a day, and they work very single day. You got 1,000 hours.

In that 1,000 hours you're expected--supposed to do a few things. You've got about 3,000 appointments. That's about 20 minutes an appointment. But there are other things to do too. You've got to move to Washington. You've got to take your kids out of school. You've got to pack everything up. You've got to move to Washington. You have to find a place to live. You have to talk to your wife, your husband, you got to get them moved. And other people want to talk to you. The press wants to talk to you. You'd be amazed how much the press wants to talk. And you want to talk to them. And then the senators, they want to talk to you. Governors want to talk to you. Foreign leaders want to talk to you. They're all coming in. And each one of them has got a perfectly valid claim. They want to talk to you. Your staff wants to talk to you.

Anyways, my conclusion is that if you look at the transition period, what you want to do is not difficult. It's impossible. You can't do it. And there's only one solution. And the solution is that you must do it ahead of time. You must lay in place everything you can possibly think of ahead of time. The key elements, first of all, are choosing the people. That's critically important. You must be prepared with lists.

The second thing you must do, you must be able to tell these people where they're going. A lot of them have never been to Washington. You know, you appointment someone to a job, you have to tell them what the job is, tell them what--where the office is, where the building is, what the legislation is, what's going on.

And then third, it's very important, these people haven't followed the campaign. They don't know all the policies. They know generally what they are. So you've got to brief them on exactly what the President wants. Then you got another little factor. Every time you get one person to take the job, how many people do you have to talk to and ask. How many people do you have to pick up the phone and say, you know, I've got a great job. And they say, no, I'm busy, I'm doing that.

That reminds me of my favorite story about President Truman. At one point in his early administration he called up a friend back in Missouri and asked him to be the--I think it was the under secretary of the interior. And the guy was really stunned. And he said, "Gee whiz, I'm so honored. Mr. President, that's incredible." He said, "Surely there must have been people more qualified than me." And Truman said, "You're god damned right there are and they all said no."

[Laughter.]

MR. ANDERSON: Anyway, I'd say the first rules of transition, which I think some of us have communicated to the campaigns, is we advised the campaign, you must plan ahead. And later on we give the 1968, 1980, one is a classic example of what happens if you don't do it correctly and one is a classic example of what happens when it was done correctly.

And then the second rule is you don't tell anybody. And there's a reason for that. This is not just done idly. And the reason you don't tell anybody is that the media and the public gets fascinated by it, who are you going to appoint to Secretary of the Treasury or who is going to be the Secretary of State and so on and so forth. Next thing you know, all the damn stories about this, not the campaign. And candidates are like that. They want to talk about what they want to talk about. So the reason they don't tell you what they're doing is not that they're afraid or they're nervous, they've got a very sound reason. It doesn't make any sense in a campaign.

I'll stop.

MR. MANN: Can we rest assured that such pre-election planning has gone on this year without anyone talking about it?

MR. ANDERSON: I would be willing to bet a lot of money that both candidates have done a lot of planning.

MR. MANN: Richard Allen.

MR. ALLEN: Well, I'd just like to remind Tom, among others, and the folks assembled here today, that actually when you stop and think of it, Annelise and Marty and I were all involved in the 1968 transition and, of course, the campaign before that. And so adding 32 years three times gives us 96 collective years of experience of one kind or another either to be on the receiving end or the opening end.

So Dave Brady asked us eight basic questions. And while we will eventually get around to responding in one way or another to all eight of those questions. The first question, obviously, is the most important, what are the major obstacles to a successful transition? And I think you can reduce it all to one principle obstacle, and that is time as has been mentioned here. Jack has mentioned it and Marty has mentioned it too. And in the grand sphere of the ideological tradition of the People's Republic of China which has, I think today the campaign of the three requires, I'm going to speak today about the two musts, the ten do's and the one don't.

Of course, the first one is again, obvious, prepare early. I can remember a conversation with pre-candidate Ronald Reagan in 1979 on an airplane ride from Houston to Los Angeles after a fundraiser discussing--he was writing his announcement speech and discussing personnel. At that point he already reminded me in that discussion that we had a team leader and that was Ed Meese who by November 1979 had long since started the process of the preparations of transition and deployed our former colleagues in the Nixon Administration and his friend Pen James to be looking into personnel aspects while the policy aspects were under development. So I think that from that standpoint that was probably the earliest practical application of the principle of being prepared that I know of.

I once said not long ago in a seminar similar to this that when asked, Marty and I from the policy side really began our planning on the policy level to merge with what Ed had going in the broad strategic plan the day after the New Hampshire primary. And by March, both Marty and I had appointed a large body of working individuals, 120 in the case of foreign policy and national security, who were not only there to provide their names, not just their names, but their ideas and to work directly with the candidate.

So the preparation really took the form of a strategic plan, the component parts which came together in a way that they never did for the 1968 campaign. And I during the course of our conversation had some reference to that because I went back and--remember that I was the sole person who took notes on the 12th of December 1968, the day after the Nixon cabinet was appointed, and I have some wonderful direct quotations of Mr. Nixon that I think will enthrall you.

So the two musts are to prepare early and to be absolutely certain in the second case that there's cohesion both political and ideological in the transition team. And that should be the natural migration of a closely knit campaign staff that would develop logically into some of the team leaders for transition.

As for the ten "do's" and the one "don't." First of all, once you've won, you must move very fast. And there will never be enough people to fill the 3,000 jobs that you need. Half of those that you know will be disqualified for one reason or another. And you must always beware of free lancers, the people who run out after a Presidential election, who go abroad or who begin speaking on behalf of an Administration. This is always a lot of fun because you spend half your time on certain days knocking down the free lancers who have, sort of like the spontaneous in the bull ring, the spontaneous fellows who jump out of the stands having become emotionally excited and hold up a red kerchief and get creamed by the bull. But it's very important to cut the legs out from under the spontaneous, the spontaneous as quickly as you possibly can.

I can recall in 1968 in the discussion we had a guy in our campaign, how he got there can also be explained, who among other things was composing personnel for a Nixon Administration. And he had cabinet choices for Richard Nixon's suggestion including people like Felix Green, you remember from Vietnam days, Bill Moyers, and practically every other Nixon hater in the world. It was very interesting that he was going to be inclusive a little early. He went out and talked to these people. And it took a little back room dancing to put him in his place.

In 1968 Harry Fleming was given the job of doing the personnel picking, at least serving up the personnel. So he had his staff write a letter to everyone who was in "Who's Who." And so when Lady Bird Johnson and Elvis Presley got letters from the Nixon Administration asking for suggestions, of course, they all responded with a great deal of--

MR. : [Inaudible.]

MR. ALLEN: Yes, he did. Got one himself. They were automatic.

Another good rule that Mr. Harry Fleming, who was a very nice fellow, put into play was that if a resume came in that looked preprinted, it went right into the waste basket because it demonstrated a lack of motivation on the part of the person for not typing the resume themselves.

You have to be ready with an agenda and pick your permanent team accordingly. That's an extremely important point. You have to keep the administration and particularly in the area of foreign policy, Foggy Bottom, the Department of State, the personnel there in a minimum state of uncertainty and for a specific period of time. You have 150 to 180 days while your credibility lasts. By 150 days, the bureaucracy has taken your measure and you can no longer put into place people who you really believe need to be in.

The one "don't" is never to take responsibility for the decisions made by an outgoing administration. In the case of 1980 I had a very good relationship with Breszinski because we had a very important overhanging problem of hostages in Iran. But there was also another matter that in, in the process, we also violated a pledge we had to take in order to do something very important, and that was to save the life of Kim Dae Jung, the then Korean dissident who had been sentenced to a firing squad for an insurrection of 1979 sentence by the military junta of Korea. And through some deft maneuvering he was not only--his life was not only spared, but he was later permitted to go to the United States and today is the President of Korea.

You should trust the information that you should get, but verify it. That, of course, that was one of President Reagan's favorite phrases anyway. You need to minimize the damage that can occur. Back in 1968 on the day before the inauguration, Henry Kissinger and I were guests of Walt Rostal and McGeorge Bundy in the situation room in the National Security Council. And we were taken through the files in the safe, the Vietnam files. The next day after the inauguration, the next day we entered the offices and the files were cleaned and gone and the file cabinets were gone as well. And there was a copy of the Wall Street Journal six weeks before on the shelf, and that was the sole paper that we had. And it turned out that Marvin Watson, the Postmaster, had backed up the semi trailers during the night and all of the file safes and all the papers were on their way to Texas. It was a very interesting situation.

Another do is to take care of your friends, be sure of that. But beware of the fair weather post-election new friend. There's a category of people that I call the friends of November are the ones that come to you after the election and tell you how much they were supporting you during that period of time before the election but doing so quietly because they were far more effective that way. This is--there will be all these friends of November were strap hangers as they're called.

Above all, you must consult congressional leaders, no matter what party they're from. You must do it immediately. In the case of 1980, already in late 1978, early '79, we started a group led by Senator Laxalt. But to our utter amazement, there were only two members of the House of Representatives who had the courage to stand up and support Ronald Reagan. One was Carol Campbell of South Carolina. The other was Tom Evans of Delaware. And they became the linchpins and then the intermediaries during the campaign. It was a very close coordination under Senator Laxalt who did an amazing job.

Tenth, you should keep your shoulder blades together and always face the door. There are many daggers out there and a lot of banana peels. And there are people who don't want you and your crowd in office. You will find a great deal of media criticism. You'll be called not adroit, ideological, lightweight, inconsequential, but you still must persist. Those were always my keepers.

And finally, when you find the reporters and the cameras suddenly on your front lawn, realize that it's the equivalent of being visited by Sixty Minutes and you may be in trouble and follow President Kennedy's advice, walk slowly and smile a lot and consult your Japanese watch often.

MR. MANN: Dick, thank you very much.

Many of you, indeed, all of you agreed on the importance of early planning, of identifying key people who will serve your administration even if you don't know precisely what position they would serve in. There has been a suggestion made in recent times that the President-elect would be well advised days after his election to submit a batch of names for--

[Tape 1, Side 2.]

MR. MANN: --particularly positions identified with them. Would you agree with that strategy as a way of dealing with the long delays that have come to be built into the whole nomination, confirmation process. Jack?

MR. WATSON: So much of what the analysis turns on is the job to which the person is being appointed. And, therefore, a short answer, I want us to act and think as creatively as we possibly can about how to improve the appointment process and to shorten its duration to make it effective, to make it thorough, but not to make it impossible for good people to be appointed in a reasonable time. I don't think that's a good idea.

MR. ALLEN: It's really interesting in the case of 1980, which I considered to be infinitely superior to our 1968 exchange--I think Marty and Annelise would agree--the platform was designed deliberately as a document not for a campaign and not for an election and not for transition, but quite literally as a guide to action for a President, this President, Ronald Reagan, on January 21st. That was a platform designed in July. And it consisted of, at the advice of Dick Wirthlin, its title was these five wonderful words, "Family, Neighborhood, Work, Peace, and Freedom." And every theme of the campaign was developed from those five strategic concepts, if you will, simple strategic concepts, every statement, every major speech. And people were picked. People gravitated to the Administration. And as far as Ed was concerned, he was building a vast base.

In domestic and foreign policy, Marty and I had this body of, I guess, 225 or 230 people--

MR. : [Inaudible.]

MR. ALLEN: You were counting mine.

MR. ANDERSON: No. No.

MR. ALLEN: You were counting mine.

MR. ANDERSON: We had 461 altogether, but that's--

MR. ALLEN: 461, but Marty, Marty is a great revisionist. I think it was 460. But as--

MR. ANDERSON: I can count.

MR. ALLEN: Whatever the case may be, we had a lot of people and many of them were ready and willing to serve. I would just like to point out something else that helped a great deal. Back in 1976, there was founded the Committee on the President in Danger, which was an organization basically of democrats, real conservative democrats. And this organization became extraordinarily helpful to the Reagan campaign, but never openly. We were building a secret bridge, if you will, to the democrats. And among our earliest appointees was a large number of democrats and including the retention of Ambassador Mike Mansfield, including the appointment of Jeanne Kirkpatrick. All of these things bought us, I think, a lot of good will. They weren't done obviously for any tactical purposes, but they were, they were done because the people like Eugene Rostal and Paul Nitze and Max Kappelman and others genuinely supported the agenda. So it was very interesting to be inclusive right from the beginning, from the get go. And it worked, I thought, brilliantly.

MR. MANN: Do all of you agree with Jack's skepticism about the batch appointment idea?

MS. ANDERSON: I would agree very much with Jack. Not only--I, I don't agree that an FBI clearance should depend on the job because the FBI is not making any judgments about qualifications really. However, how can you ask taxpayers to pay for the investigation of someone who has not been asked to take a job and has not accepted that job. And I don't think you can ask them to do that.

And second, I think that this gives the government the power to say, oh, let's investigate so and so. Let's do an FBI clearance. We may appoint them to something. And so it allows you to turn the FBI into an investigative agency on someone who has not even agreed to take a job. And that gives enormous power. If this process needs to be streamlined, I'm sure it does, people can and do serve before the FBI clearance goes through. They can be appointed acting before the Senate confirms. If this needs to be done, that's fine. But to have the FBI investigating people who haven't even agreed to take a job I think is serious.

MR. : This is just an idea. As far as I know, it was first floated by Boyden Gray. And it's an interesting problem, because there is a bottleneck. And I think you're right, though, you can do it ahead of time. But what I'd like to see, I don't think anyone has ever paid a lot of attention to exactly how the FBI does the investigation, who does the investigation.

And we've seen in recent years that they screw up other things. And I think we ought to take a very careful look at it. And I don't see any reason why it should take as long as it does. Besides, if Bush should win, all the Clinton Administration has to do is to give us back the 900 files they got, and we got a head start.

MR. : [Inaudible.]

MR. : I said Clinton.

[Laughter.]

MR. : It's good to say I have nothing to do with this Administration.

MR. : What happened to our spirited bipartisanship, huh, Jack?

MR. ALLEN: We appointed, the Reagan Administration appointed a whole lot of Democrats. And that was bold distinction to what the Clinton Administration has done. Isn't it amazing? It struck me as something very, very interesting. The Clinton Administration, as I think Norm mentioned, it was nine months. I would demur slightly, in some cases it was 18 months. You must have been averaging. It was 18 months until a full comparable was in place, because they had a lot of very unusual and new requirements, ethnic, religion, sectional, regional, etcetera, a run on Democrats, a run on Republicans, or, in fact, there were none, except those appointed in the commissions and the like.

I am astonished that this Administration had the opportunity, the present Administration had the opportunity to build. And I think that a lot of the good will that President Reagan engendered by his early appointments, people who were credible to the other side, really helped a great deal to build a bit of confidence and to get some things done that ordinarily would not be done.

MR. MANN: I think all of you have argued directly or indirectly the importance of getting the key White House Staff up and running early, the, presumably the Chief of Staff. At what point then does the Chief of Staff take over the transition activities or are those really wisely kept separate? What, Jack, what's your sense of division of labor here in how quickly you move to integrate the transition planning operation with the White House Staff operation?

MR. WATSON: I was in two such different situations, obviously. In 1976 as an incoming President, I was--I had--let me back up and say something that I think is important because it so reinforces a couple of points that all three of my friends and colleagues have made here. And that is start early. We actually started the transition planning in May, after Carter won the Pennsylvania primary, I didn't think he had a chance to be elected until then. And when he won the Pennsylvania primary, defeating Senator Scoop Jackson in a labor state, it occurred to me and others, who were working closely with Jimmy Carter at the time, that the man was likely to be President. He was certainly likely to be the democratic nominee.

So at or about that time we began--actually, I began a series of memoranda to Governor, former Governor Carter at that time just laying out what I was suggesting that he might do in terms of pre-transition planning. My very old and good friend Harrison Wellford, who will be on the platform in a few minutes, was one of the people that I reached out to, to serve with me in that--and we called it Carter/Mondale policy planning group, very low profile, quiet group. Harrison at the time was the Chief Legislative Assistant to Senator Phil Hart of Michigan. And just a quick footnote, I'm sitting in Atlanta, Georgia, in my law office, a complete unknown nobody to anybody in the country, and all of the sudden there comes to me a letter written in longhand, three pages long, from Senator Philip Hart. He said, "Dear Mr. Watson," in effect, I have a young man on my staff who I think will be of great aid and assistance to Governor Carter in his efforts to plan a transition. And that young man is Harrison Wellford. I called Harrison and we proceeded.

I tell that story, Tom, only because starting early, quietly, in a focused way is terribly important. You can't wait till now to do it.

In 1980 I was the Chief of Staff for the President. And I was the transition coordinator. It was a natural flow of responsibility. So in the case of the outgoing Administration, it's not a necessary collocation of responsibility, but it's a natural one. Coming in, it's quite different. And I would say that coming in there are roles and responsibilities of a transition coordinator that don't relate directly to a chief of staff's responsibility. And I would suggest that in all probability it would be better if, Marty and Annelise, to have different people, a transition coordinator, and the Presidential Chief of Staff designate doing their respective roles.

MR. : [Inaudible.]

MR. ANDERSON: Yeah. It's a little above my pay grade, but--

MR. : That's okay. Go for it, Marty.

MR. ANDERSON: But it seems that the Chief of Staff is a job like a cabinet official and he's got a lot of things to get in place and work on, and he shouldn't be worrying about the rest of the transition activities.

MR. ALLEN: I have one note to add, the disappointment in a way, because I saw it happen twice. I mentioned that I have the notes of Mr. Nixon after he had appointed the cabinet at sort of an Ed Sullivan Show at the Shoreham Hotel, named all the cabinet, one in which cabinet member being here today, George Schultz, and in the process spoke about his dear friend, his longtime colleague, and he was going to be the Secretary of Commerce, and then forgot to mention his name in the show. It was an interesting evening. I think we all three were there.

But some of the things he said were interesting and one of them was the most fatal thing is not to be wrong, but to be colorless. So if you make a mistake, you're wrong, not me. Don't limit your appointments to close friends. For the good of the country, for the good of the party, make a broad base. What counts is not how it looks now, but how it looks six months from now totally.

The tendency will be to keep more than you should. We left too many in the Eisenhower Administration and regretted it. Don't keep them if you don't have to. It struck me in my subsequent experience, particularly in the NSC, which became the Nixon National Security Council, which became populated by a staff so virulently anti-Nixon that it was hard to imagine. And I was on the campaign, I was the only one from the campaign and existed in a sea of hostility. It was very interesting, but federal policy people, that Nixon, President Nixon never took the time to vet his appointments himself. That was the occasion of the conversation that I had that I referred to as November of 1979 in the airplane ride from Houston to Los Angeles.

And I thought at the time, I had a discussion briefly with Governor Reagan, that he too wouldn't spend time. It always seemed to me that in the first six months, nine months of an administration, that 30 minutes of every day, and it comes to a point and it should be carved out, just for the President himself should review that, the appointments. I wonder how often that happened. I think President Reagan had--and Ed would be able to speak to this much more eloquently and more broadly than I did--had a deep interest. But also through the process of delegation, after you've been with a man for so long, as Jack with President Carter, Harrison was and Annelise and I with--and Marty with Ronald Reagan, you sort of know what he wants. You don't even have to ask. Those appointments are fine. But there are many more appointments that come in, appointments that are made that could be mistakes. And I think it's partly the result of the President not focusing enough in detail on the resumes and curriculum vitae of people served up to him.

MR. ANDERSON: I want to say one thing. You mentioned about the Nixon operation. I'm just going to take a few minutes, because I know in the next panel that the people there can tell you how a good one should work. Let me give you an example of why I think '68 failed miserably and not many people know. The reasons why I think Richard Nixon made those appointments, basically made a short purse out of a sow's ear. They tried to plan early in '68. And they had a guy named Glen Oles [ph.], and it's a long story, but just to set the record straight, both Richard and I opposed him, but we lost the fight. And they spent hundreds of thousands of dollars and this guy came in and worked very strenuously since early in the spring of the year and put together a massive dossier on thousands and thousands of people.

And after the election was over, Peter Flannagan was in--the President took charge of the cabinet and Peter Flannagan was basically going to do everything from level 2 down to level 5. And they opened up these boxes. And the short answer is after two or three days they decided it was a total utter disaster. They threw the boxes away. And that's when they went over and they drafted the speech writers and the policy people and we became personnel people.

And I can remember, you know, walking into the Pier Hotel, $3 cups of coffee, and sitting there in the morning with Peter and someone would bring in and open up the dossier and say, okay, today, and say deputy secretary of such and such. And someone would say, what does he do? I don't know. Anybody got any ideas? Look around the room and nobody would have any idea, and go on to the next person. Now, we did this for two or three days, you know, on, week after week. And we knew some people. But after a while we had run out of time. We had run out of friends. We didn't know any people. And that's when Richard Nixon decided to do something really revolutionary, let the cabinet pick their own people. That's why he did it.

MR. ALLEN: Marty is actually right, except they did throw away the three boxes, but I have them all in my files.

[Laughter.]

MR. : Natural archaist.

MR. MANN: Jack, I'd like to pick up something you said at the very beginning, the importance of excluding things. And I want to ask you about this. Some people caution that one of the dangers of a transition is that you get too much advice from well meaning advisors and that you have too many people involved in "transition activities," like preparing elaborate reports on departments and the rest that largely get in the way of the core activities which is to figure out the focus agenda, get the key staff people up and running, plan your overtures with the Congress, deal with the press and the like. How do you manage that? There is this large apparatus. A lot of people want to give friendly advise and you have these teams, transition teams working, how do you keep that from becoming an obstacle to a successful transition?

MR. WATSON: It's extremely hard. I don't have an easy answer. In the questions that our host submitted to all of us, what are the major obstacles to a successful transition, I jotted down one, lack of sharp focus on highest and most immediate priorities. I've already addressed that. Two, lack of discipline in the transition organization. Lack of sufficient command and control over the overall transition operation and the people speaking. Three, too many people purporting to speak on behalf of the President-elect. That's your point, Tom.

In so many respects, I would most respectfully suggest as a sort of guiding principle, that less is best in a transition. That's what I'm trying to get at with my council about focus, about exclusion, about simplification, about holding down onto those most important matters which must be addressed, for one reason or another, in the early days of the new Administration and nothing else, nothing else.

And the only, my answer to your question, Tom, is you do it by the hardest. You insist, to the extent that you can, that the President make clear delegations of authority and responsibility and that they be communicated to the people that need to know them. Second, you tell the press, you let the press know in a structured and focused and organized way, these designated people will be the spokespersons for me during the transition and nobody else.

MR. ALLEN: One other complicated factor that needs to be kept in mind is that when a campaign for the nomination succeeds, it is suddenly expanded at a tremendous rate, almost overnight. Campaign staff is usually a close knit group of comrades who have been through hell and been back again. And they trust one another. There's a great deal of collegiality and interchange at all times at all levels. And then when you win, you've got a Vice President on board and you have a melding of staffs. Then occurs some very curious phenomenon. I won't go into all of the details here, but it becomes--

MR. : It's called infighting.

MR. ALLEN: Called infighting, jockeying for position. So what happened, what had happened in the 1968 campaign, I was looking recently at the campaign staff of the 1968 Nixon campaign staff. It was four mimeographs--remember mimeograph machines--four mimeograph pages double-sided. That was the entire staff. And, of course, when Governor Agnew was selected, it wasn't augmented by more than one or two names. So we had--and Annelise went out on the plane with Governor Agnew and I gave him his first foreign policy briefing, but those are stories for our memories. The point being that something happens that changes the nature of your organization and new tensions are introduced. Very interesting. And then suddenly you begin finding some of what we might call the wrong people showing up. But you've got to have those wrong people on board in order to win the election. And then suddenly the jockeying begins and that's when your shoulder blades really have to come together.

MR. MANN: Annelise?

MS. ANDERSON: I am going to make just a brief remark since we've been talking about--since we haven't talked about intra-party transitions and we have a potential one coming up with Gore--is that the Reagan/Bush transition was not as good as it could have been. And there is a tendency on the part of the President-elect in these kinds of a situation to feel that he's got to remake his team and have it be his own. And he has to balance that against the fact that he's got a lot of experienced people who are part of his support. And Bush really ended a lot of Reagan's people in this process. And that was one of the weaknesses of his Administration. He had a few people that he kept on, but not many. That's a tricky thing to balance, to make it your own and, yet, to get the new people. And so I just wanted to say that. That that's a way to fail.

MR. MANN: That was going to be, and I'm so glad you raised it, my last question before we turn to the audience. So I want to spend a little time on this. It's especially problematic this year because of Vice President Gore's need to, obvious need to separate himself from the President, at the same time he shows tremendous continuity with the policy agenda of this Administration. So it becomes very tricky how, how to manage that. I'd love to hear from all three of you on this particular issue. Dick, do you want to begin?

MR. ALLEN: This is a unique situation. The 1988 situation need not have been. I think Annelise was not only correct, but she was almost overly kind. Because what occurred was the summary execution of all the Reaganauts. Now, I take credit for inventing the word "Reaganaut" as in astronaut not Argonaut. But I invented two other words at the same time, and neither of them stuck. That was Reagoon, who was a hard line Reaganaut, and then Reaganinny, who was a Reaganaut gone soft. But those two didn't stick, so it's not--but I got into a discussion a few weeks ago, and I think Norm, you were there, a few months ago, you and Tom, first you were both there, and Brent Skowcroft immediately said, that's absolutely ridiculous, summary execution. I said it did too happen. He said, we were a different Administration. And I thought to myself--I didn't say this, maybe I was cut off by one of you two--how do you think you all got there? There is a process. And so it should never have occurred that way. But it's always been on my mind as to whether or not George Bush actually knew what was going on and made a summary execution of Reaganauts or whether he simply through lassitude approved it and did nothing to stop it. But that's exactly what happened.

MR. : And I think it's probably going to happen if Gore wins the election next week. It's a very difficult problem because the new President wants his own team. The problem is he comes from part of a team that's selected from a group of people and ostensibly the President took the best of them. So that's, you're torn. And I think what happened in some of the past times was the desire to do it "your way," even though it was second best won. And they did that. I think that's a terrible mistake. I think you ought to steel yourself and the new President should say what he really wants are the best possible people, because if they succeed, he succeeds. And it's very difficult to do. And there are some wonderful stories.

There is some note as to President Bush's because I, I had my own--I was serving on the general advisory committee and arms control and disarmament, a Presidential appointment, and a few weeks after the election, I got a call from somebody in the Bush White House and said, well, now, as is customary, the President wants your resignation. Well, it wasn't customary. And I had been, you know, appointed by Reagan and confirmed by the staff so I said, well, I was kind of annoyed. Then I got a letter from him demanding. So I called back and said, look, tell you what, if he wants my resignation, give me a call and I'd give it to him. He never called. So I stayed on.

[Laughter.]

MR. MANN: Jack.

MR. WATSON: I think a case, a strong case can be made that an intra-party transition is, in fact, more difficult than an inter-party transition. And if we were having an academic debate on it, I'd love to have that side because there are so many, there are so many facets of human interaction that exist in the intra-party one that don't generally speaking in the inter-party one where it's a new broom sweeping and cleaning automatically. Okay, point one.

Point two, this is an illustration, I think, of at least what I mean when I say you're not a candidate anymore. You're the President-elect. And forming your team, having been elected President of the United States, to be inaugurated on January 20th, you're chief, if not sole responsibility for the moment, is to put together the very best team you can possibly aggregate without regard to whether it's a continuation of somebody in the Clinton Administration or of firing a jettisoning of someone in the Clinton Administration. But in that sense, in that sense, the political aspect of it should take second place, choose your best team, go for the best people. If there are some people in the Clinton Administration, assuming here hypothetically that Gore were to be elected, then by all means if he is--if there are people in whom he has high confidence, he should keep them. If they are not, they should go, period.

MR. MANN: All right. I'd like now to turn to the audience. Mr. Schultz?

MR. SCHULTZ: I'd like to ask a question about the difficulty of getting people confirmed and into place, the process of governing. And I think it's very relevant to getting people to agree to serve in the first place what they have to go through. And I'll make an observation and then put a question to the panel.

The observation is that over time, say, the last 20 or 25 years, the process of investigation has gotten more and more intrusive. To the point where now, at least as I have been told about it, you fill out such an extensive questionnaire that has so many details which you may or may not remember accurately, that it's almost as though you put any potential prosecutor in the position of automatically being able to prosecute anybody because nobody can conceivably get it all right. And it's almost as though that's done deliberately so that there's something hanging over your head. So it's a pretty awful process.

And as far as I can see, the process had not produced better people. It hasn't produced a situation where everybody is squeaky clean. So my question is, why do we want to have such a process? Why can't you people who are involved in talking about transitions, and maybe whoever it is the President-elect will hear you, say there should be a drastic change, I mean drastic. The process of vetting is in the President-elect's control. It's not a statutory thing. It's by orders of one kind or another.

So somebody was talking about FBI--got to have an FBI investigation of everybody. The rumor is that if Bush is elected, Colin Powell will be asked to be Secretary of State. Do you have to take nine months with an FBI investigation of Colin Powell? Give me a break. You don't need anything, nothing. Maybe you can do a cursory, one-day check. That's enough. He doesn't have to fill out a form.

So why not make and have the new President declare he's going to do it differently? He's going to start out with the notion that the people that he wants to appoint are trustworthy. And they'll be asked questions about whether they know themself, they have any particular problems that disqualify them. And you speed the whole process up. And to challenge the Congress to speed up the process of confirmation because, while I agree with Annelise, the government continues, it doesn't continue in the way the new President wants until that person is put into place, not just a cabinet. That's the easy part. The harder part is all these deputies and assistant secretaries and whatnot, where the jobs are not so glamorous and it's hard work and it seems to me it--a different approach is called for.

I had a fellow who worked with me named Paul Nitze, that many of you know, a wonderful man. And Paul in his autobiography tells about how he wound up in his first appointment in the government. It turns out that FDR saw World War II coming and he saw he didn't have any in with the financial community and he persuaded Jim Forrestel, who was a partner in Dillon, Reed [ph.], to come to work in the White House. So according to Paul he's then, he's also a partner at Dillon, Reed, he's down in Houston, or somewhere, doing some deal and he gets a cable from Forrestel saying, I want you in my office here at 10:00 o'clock, Monday morning. So a good friend, he goes. And Forrestel says, there's a heap of work for you to do here. What I have is this office and we have a secretary out there that we can share, put an extra desk in here. I've rented a house over in Georgetown. I've got a room for you over there. Don't have anyway to pay you so you'll have to stay on the Dillon, Reed payroll. So he started totally illegally. But the point is, there is about as high a quality of public servant as the country can imagine.

And to some--it doesn't occur to anybody that Paul Nitze isn't trustworthy, patriotic and going to do the job right. Now, Paul Nitze is an exceptional person. But I think this process has been not just a little overdone, it's totally bankrupt. And the right way to do it is junk the whole thing and start all over again with a few simple rules and with the idea that somebody who wants to come and serve actually might be trusted. So what's wrong with that?

[Applause.]

MR. : What is encouraging is the extent to which a broad bipartisan consensus is developing in support of precisely the point you've made and the argument that you have made. And there is, there is work underway now, let me just say, to move forward as quickly as possible. Some things can be done, as you suggest, by the President-elect just making decisions. Other things will require Executive orders. And there is an effort underway to get this outgoing Administration with bipartisan advice to make some changes in the process, streamlining that are within the scope of the President's authority.

In the bill that just passed the Congress at the end of--a month or so ago, is a requirement that by the beginning of January the Administration report back with recommendations for changes in the ethics in government law that would change some of the requirements of financial disclosure. And let me say there's a piece in the new foreign affairs that came out by Norman Ornstein, our colleague here, and Tom Donilon called "The Confirmation Clog," that has a number of very specific recommendations to moving precisely the direction that you recommend. Now, our colleagues, Marty?

MR. ANDERSON: To the best of my knowledge there's a Grade A example to what you want done. I don't think the President gets investigated. We use the political process. The main part of having all the investigations, you know that they're asked the question, have you ever done anything that might embarrass the President. Well, if everyone answered truthfully, we'd all be here. And I think that the basic idea should be the political process. They don't ask a President. The President doesn't get checked. And we watch him for four years. And we find out if he does anything that embarrasses us. And we decide if we want to keep him or not. And we've had classic examples of that.

And maybe that should be extended to a lot of people. Maybe some things of national security that you want to do some special checks, but most of it has, I think it's gotten to the point where it's almost silly.

MR. WATSON: I can't, I cannot begin to say how much I agree with the tone and tenor of your comment. We have degenerated this process to a game of Gotcha, Gotcha. We have also degenerated in this process to a kind of investigative process that would make the National Inquirer look responsible. I mean that with conviction. I mean that. And if the question is put to me, have you ever done anything in your life that might cause embarrassment, my truthful answer is I've done so many things in my life that would cause embarrassment and for which I'm ashamed, I cannot begin to enumerate them.

But the question is, the question should be is this person, this man or this woman when the President-elect or the President of the United States wants to fill this post, is that person competent to do the job, period.

MR. MANN: Annelise?

MS. ANDERSON: Well, I think that what Tom said has to be looked at, because we've got an ethics in government law, conflict of interest, all kinds of stuff. I remember filling out form after form and doing it every single year long while I was a member of the National Science Board and that wasn't even--that was, in effect, an advisory position. And we've got to do something about that because it does discourage people. The people that you want in government have enough other responsibilities that may conflict with their serving in government and you got to get them.

MR. : Can I say something? It, it may be a partisan issue, at least on a short term basis, because I'm afraid that if Al Gore wins, I don't think the Republicans are going to change it for Al Gore. On the other hand, if Bush should win by a large enough margin, then I think you could change it. But that's just a--

MR. MANN: Well, I think it would be important to act under either circumstance. It's part of the culture. Anyone who is willing to serve in public life is assumed guilty until proven innocent. One of the suggestions Norm makes in this piece is to decriminalize the appointment process. Do you know it's now possible to have criminal prosecution for information provided in the course of being considered for appointment for office? Yes, it has gone way, way too far. And I think it's important that we build this broad bipartisan coalition determined to change it and take the heat from some who are committed to this, what I think is a criminalization of the political process.

We have time for one more question before--

MR. : I'm troubled by the fact that there hasn't been any discussion on the point that Mr. Watson made that, remember, you are the President-elect and you shouldn't comment on what the incumbent President is saying. Nowadays, for example, if Bush were elected, think of the problems he would have to deal with after January 20th about which the incumbent President has to deal with. For example, the Middle East. Now, I know there are problems about that. President Hoover tried to bring President-elect Roosevelt into the Oval Office to discuss what should be done about the depression and President-elect Roosevelt declined. But I think the seriousness now is of international issues are such that the President-elect cannot exclude himself from participation in issues which will very much affect his incumbency. And I wonder whether Mr. Watson would consider that as an exception today?

MR. WATSON: Sir, I would respectfully say that if the President-elect is asked by the President for input or advice, then by all means he gives it. I would also respectfully suggest that in most cases that that interplay, that conversation between the incumbent President and the President-elect would best be between the two of them and not for public review and commentary by everybody.

I don't, I still stand by my point, sir. It's not that I think that there are not issues that the incumbent President can do things on, can take actions on that will foreclose and limit the options of the incoming President, of course, that can happen. And one would hope that the incumbent President, out of respect for the institution and the government, would not do such things. I also know that there are, there are ways in which the incoming President could be of collaborative help to the incumbent President on this or that issue. But I, I think that the proposition, the fundamental proposition of there being only one Presidential voice between the election in November and the inauguration in January is so compellingly important that you ought to be very careful about anything which makes exception to it.

MR. : Just one other brief comment. I don't often disagree with my colleague Arnold Beckman [ph.], but I would in this case. In 1980 it was proven that the strategy of not saying anything, but listening a lot and carefully listening was best. Many times Ed Meese and I went to the State Department to be briefed by Warren Christopher and other assistant secretaries on the hostage crisis. We resolved not to say anything. We simply listened and reported to the President-elect.

In the case I mentioned of the prospective execution of Kim Dae Jung, Secretary Muskie asked that we, I, jointly condemn the Korean military regime publicly, which I declined to do and consulted with the candidate and was given some latitude to affect a solution. And it worked best that way, because the notion, as Jack and others have said, that only one President at a time is absolutely correct and it was that way till just a minute after Ronald Reagan was sworn in and the note was handed to him that the hostages were wheels out of Tehran and on their way home.

MR. MANN: I'd like to work in one last question for John Robeson [ph.]. And then we will, we will take that question and then we will move into our break. Sir?

MR. ROBESON: This is really by way of suggestion and that is that if this project wants to do something for the republic, it would take seriously the observations that have been made about what's happened to the confirmation and appointment process and after this election, get your heads together, find the right people to work with on a bipartisan basis, and see if you can change the government and ethics law. Because the points that George just made about the investigative part are only half the story because the financial part is absolutely draconian. And I will just give you an example which is me. My fourth confirmation by the Senate was in the Bush Administration. It took me seven months to get into the job. And I paid accountants and lawyers--and I ain't no Rockefeller--twice as much as I made as Deputy Treasury Secretary, to get through that process simply because of the financial disclosure. That's wrong. Do something about it. This is a great nucleus to start and I encourage you to grab a hold of it and, Norm, you can make this into something that will really contribute to the welfare of the country.

MR. MANN: Thank you very much for that comment.

[Applause.]

MR. MANN: Listen, we will now bring this panel to an end. I want to invite our panelists to stay in the audience, because we will have a broader discussion in the second panel. And I ask you to be ready to weigh in on that second panel as well. I hope the audience will join me in thanking our colleagues here today.

[End of Panel 1.]

Stauffer Auditorium, Hoover Institution
Sanford University
October 30, 2000

Moderator
Norman J. Ornstein, Resident Scholar, American Enterprise Institute

Panelists
David Brady, Senior Fellow, Hoover Institution
Edwin Meese III, Distinguished Visiting Fellow, Hoover Institution
Harrison Wellford, Latham & Watkins

P R O C E E D I N G S

[Tape 2, Side 1.]

MR. ORNSTEIN: If everybody could please take your seats, those of you milling around the sides. Yeah. And I just saw Jack a minute ago. Yeah. Here's Jack.

All right. Ladies and gentlemen, we're going to get started. I will announce the reception, yes. Thank you very much.

We will now start our second session which is going to run from now until 4:15. There will be immediately following that session a reception, not here, but across the hall. You will see just as you leave the auditorium going out through the back the staff room, staff lounge with some very nice refreshments set up there. So we hope you will join us there as well.

We have another terrific panel for you. And as Tom mentioned at the end of the last session, we are going to try and draw into this discussion our panelists from the last session who also represented an enormous range, I guess now probably about 125 years collectively of experience. I wouldn't say we can equal that up here, but probably fairly close. We'll get up to 250 before we're done in any event.

A couple of initial comments. Last, in the last session, of course, we talked about a lot of things involving transitions, a lot of do's and don'ts and now we're going to go into those a little bit further to talk about what works and what doesn't, what should work, what shouldn't, what should be done, and what shouldn't.

It's important at this point to emphasize that we probably haven't had an election in which the transition, starting November the 8th, if we know who the winner is, has been more important. We don't know much about this election at this point. We do know this. The next President, whether it's Governor Bush or Vice President Gore, is going to face a Congress with margins, partisan margins probably smaller than we have seen in 50 years, maybe longer. There may very well be margins of one or two in each house of Congress. And we may not know the party's holding a majority for quite some time, particularly in the House. And with margins as small as they may be, they may slip back and forth.

We know based on past experience and what's likely to be ahead that we're going to have a Congress with weak leaders, stark ideological divisions between the par ties at both the junior and senior levels, and a continuation of partisan acrimony that has been building cumulatively for a number of years. No matter the intentions of the next President, the ability to govern in this kind of a climate, and frankly the ability to govern in a climate of peace and prosperity, relatively speaking, where you have more trouble grabbing people's attention and having the process cut you the slack to be able to do what you want to do, makes it very, very difficult. And it means that some of the lessons that we learned or that were drawn in the last panel, acting quickly to begin with, but including several others which we will discuss a little bit here and I want to draw it a little bit, becomes absolutely critical.

One of the things that that means is whatever you can get done to expedite this process early on, including through an Executive Order from the outgoing President, to help make it easier becomes even more important this time. And acting quickly, let me say, even though it seems obvious is extremely difficult to do. These candidates, both, are going to end up utterly exhausted, spent, drawn the morning after the election. With the stakes this high, an election this close, they're working harder than they ever have before because you can't waste a nanosecond.

So the last thing you want to do is wake up, if you get any sleep at all, the morning after the election and start immediately with 20 hour days beginning to plan what you're going to do on January the 20th. You need some period to rest and recharge and at the same time you're going to be faced with a lot of additional pressures which include one of the things that wasn't mentioned in this last session, planning an inaugural. Now, that may be just a fancy set of parties in some ways, but it takes on an enormous amount of significance as the kickoff to the Presidency, but also all those people who worked for you, all those people who contributed to you see that as an extraordinarily important culmination. And the resources and the energy that go into simply planning the inaugural are remarkable, but they draw away from the resources and energy required to plan a government.

Now, add to that another phenomenon which is the press begins its honeymoon, in some ways, the day after the election. Suddenly, qualities that they did not see in candidates emerge in Presidents-elect. Oh, he makes his own English muffins. Isn't that wonderful. He's a man of the people. And your approval rating goes up much higher, of course, than the percentage of votes that you get as the American people naturally rally around you. And it's very easy under those circumstances to believe that you're doing everything right for weeks as you coast along if you're doing nothing because all the feedback you're getting is, hey, this is great. You're terrific. Everything is going swimmingly. November can be gone just like that if you're not very careful and if you don't act with enormous determination.

Now, it requires as our panelists said as well things like getting your team organized quickly. Picking, I think almost everybody now agrees especially as we look at some of what happened with previous administrations, including, I would argue, Carter and Clinton, picking a chief of staff and a strong chief of staff for the White House right away. Sending the signal that you're going to have a hierarchical organization and a team. Because one of the things that happens if you don't pick a chief of staff quickly is you're going to have ten people who think they should be chief of staff and 150 people who want their candidate being chief of staff spending most of their time and energy sticking knives in the others or jockeying around to try and develop a power center that's a rival to another power center.

And frankly, one of the things--I hope I'm not speaking out of school, Jack--but one of the things that happened in the beginning of the Clinton Administration and happened in the Carter team as well is that transition directors were picked who were logical potential candidates for chief of staff. And the in fighting who didn't want them out. It was Mickey Kantor in the Clinton case and Jack in the Carter case, not only drained the energy, but it meant that they didn't start with an appropriate structure in the White House. If the new President-elect does not heed that lesson very quickly and choose a chief of staff, and then as Jack said, also choose a transition director. They can't be one in the same. But the worst thing you can do is choose a transition director and not choose a chief of staff simultaneously where you end up sapping your own energies inside.

Another lesson, which I think is very important. It was mentioned in the previous panel, but just in passing by Marty Anderson. Ronald Reagan picked Pen James or his team picked Pen James early, a person professionally qualified to deal with personnel. Oftentimes Presidents-elect will pick personnel directors who don't really know much about choosing personnel. They're chosen for other reasons.

Getting an operation in place, now it means getting an extraordinarily sensitive and competent computer program in place. But it also means matching up resumes and qualifications with positions that on the surface often don't describe what the positions do or what you need for those positions. Hard to tell with a deputy secretary or an undersecretary or an assistant secretary requires first and foremost substantive expertise or management expertise or what kinds of qualifications. And the resumes often don't get matched up appropriately or you can get this clog in the process at a very early stage before you can get underway.

Just a couple of other quick points. One that I think was not emphasized enough and that is really important this time, getting your staff team in place, getting the rest of your team moving along so that you can get them in place quickly. Those are absolutely critical. Just as important is getting a policy agenda established. That means planning--there are 200 day efforts here. The first starts November the 8th. The second starts January the 20th. This time, the honeymoon, the policy honeymoon is going to be about the same length as Anna Nicole Smith's honeymoon, which means very, very short. So if you do not have one, two or at most three substantive priorities, top things that you want to do right away and you can get Congress in a bipartisan fashion, because literally nothing will happen in this next Congress without having it occur in a bipartisan way. And you can't do more than three if you don't pick carefully among them. And let's face it, each of these candidates has a number of very important things, but they number far more than three. And it's going to require choosing some over others for quick action. And that's going to be a tricky and difficult thing to do. That process has to begin November 8th as well.

You're going to have to choose some of your children, in effect, over others to move them quickly and develop a game plan. If you try and do too much, you will probably end up with absolutely nothing or at least very little being done. And this time, as well, it's going to be very important in the personnel process to deal with another element that did not get mentioned, because it's almost too frightening to contemplate these days, and that is the Senate of the United States, which has become as big an obstacle to getting a team in place or keeping a team in place as anybody else. The hold, which is not mentioned in the Constitution, it's not mentioned in the Senate rules, it's an informal process that has become a monster which enables any individual Senator anonymously to hold a nomination for anybody indefinitely practically speaking. And which has become in which hundreds are held, not because there's any objection to them, but as hostages for completely extraneous purposes.

One of the things that we have recommended is there's an informal, or has been for some time an informal kind of compact between Senate leaders and Presidents-elect, that if they pick their cabinet expeditiously, the Senate will hold hearings and begin the process for the cabinet during the month of December and early January so that they're ready to be confirmed on January 20th so that you have at least some appointees of the President in place when the government begins. That should be extended and at minimum in the national security area where we have a tremendous problem. I'll be interested to see if my colleagues who dealt with this would agree, most everybody I've talked to would suggest that every incoming administration ends up making some mistakes in the first three months. Some of them based on campaign rhetoric, some just because they don't have people in place and they don't have the records in place. The Archives Act now requires that all the hard drives be removed, all the cabinets, all the files be taken out of the White House when a new team comes in. It's important to get not just the cabinet, but many of the officials, at least the top 10, in the national security area all confirmed right at the beginning so that you don't end up with mistakes that you spend four years trying to work your way out of. And that's going to require action on the part of the Senate and it's going to require an awful lot of effort to try and get the Senate away from its childish ego maniacal behavior. And I'm being gentle here, I might add.

So with those lessons to be drawn, let's look more broadly. And I want to turn first to Dave Brady who listened carefully and has read widely on the subject and is going to give us a little bit of a summary of what we've heard in the earlier period and maybe some questions for our panel. Again, you have their bios, Harrison Wellford, experienced in transition to and from Carter and Clinton and Ed Meese, of course, with wide experience from the beginning of the Reagan Administration and otherwise as well.

Dave, what have you got to say?

MR. BRADY: Okay. So having not had anything to do with transition in Washington, only academic transition, I guess my role is to tell you what I thought I heard. One, transitions are twofold, two problems. One is you're moving from one President to the other and putting one team in place of another team. And second, you're making the transition from campaigning to governing. Those are two, two separate activities.

The first seemed impossible. It was like putting together a multi-million dollar corporation to put a new corporation into place and then tearing the corporation down that you put together the transition team and getting rid of it in 75 days. That's hard to do in a context where there's a market situation where people come in and try to put corporations together. That's hard to do. It's exceedingly hard to do, it seems to me, in a political situation and the political situation has been mentioned by others. But a part of that, certainly, is managing expectations. The expectations for a new President are quite high, as Norm and others have mentioned. And in that situation where there's hyper excitement, you're excited, it seems to me that that exacerbates the problem of putting that team together.

The second problem is the switch from campaigning to governing. And, here, what I got off of it was if the President has a policy focus rather than a theme focus, it's a bit easier to do. It's solved if your team is cohesive and there's a ideology that carries over from the campaign. That leaves me to say that sort of implicitly in the academic literature says the following thing, but the first panel I think would agree with this, the Reagan transition is universally recognized as the best transition. And so what did they do? And here's what I got out of the discussion.

One, they planned early. Second, the people who did the planning knew what the President wanted in regard to policy, and that helped them a lot. The team was delegated power and was cohesive and the team was Mel-managed. I thought Ed would like that. The President managed--and the fourth thing is, and here's something they didn't mention. I'll come back to this. The President managed the press and citizens’ expectations particularly well.

Now, the Clinton transition and the Reagan/Bush transition and the Nixon transition were all viewed as not as successful because in some way they failed on one of those dimensions. It seems to me that one of the questions I have, but it was partially answered in the questions that were asked, was why does it seem the transitions within a party appear to be harder? I gathered the answer to that, a general outline of the answer is that the balance between the outgoing and incoming within the same party is hard. And it's hard because it's my team and your team, and in a sense we're both on the same team. And that might even be particularly hard, it seems to me, if the vice president--if it's a vice president coming in on the grounds that many of the people in the outgoing can think, well, the guy wouldn't be here if it hadn't been for us in the first place. So it seems to me that there are sort of natural human reasons why those transitions are a bit harder to manage, sensitivities are likely to be, but it has to be done.

The second question--so that's one thing I'd like a little more elaboration on that. The second question I had is that it really wasn't until primaries, the increase in primaries. You know, in the 1960 Presidential election, 85 percent of all the delegates were selected not by primaries, but by caucus. So if you read Theodore White's great book "The Making of the President 1960," you actually find out that the candidates spent all their time going around talking to party professionals like Mayor Daley and so on and so forth.

As the primaries rose, as we--as this fashion began outsider candidate, someone running from outside Washington, it seems that those are somewhat associated with the rise of problem transitions. Another sort of evidence of--and why is that? Because, well, people are outsiders, they come in. They don't know Washington. Maybe they don't have the bargaining skills that are necessary to do it. And at least part of the budget seems to have fit that out, because it wasn't until 1963 that the Congress actually began to put forward a budget for the outgoing Presidency and the incoming Presidency. So I'd like to know a little bit more about the role of the campaigning and the perpetual campaigning and that.

And the final question I have is one that wasn't mentioned very much. And that is--and no one mentioned, how do you manage the press during the transition? What do I mean by that?

Well, I agree--so, how does Clinton know about the nanny problem? How do you know that the press is going to dig and find that? And that's relevant to Mr. Schultz's question. And that seems to mean the following thing. While I agreed absolutely 100 percent with what he said, what's the probability that if a President decided to do this on his own that the press wouldn't start coming up, do their own investigations, get them in trouble. So it seems to me that one thing that hasn't been mentioned is in the transition period how is the press and particularly a press that's very investigative and loves to get a story, "Nanny Gate," whatever it is, how do you manage the press during that time period? And so that what's I got out of the first session.

MR. ORNSTEIN: David, thank you.

Let me just turn it over first to Harrison. And I would add just a couple of other elements to the structure and one other item. As you look at these questions and whatever else you want to say here, think about it from the perspective of a team coming in, as you did in 1976, a team going out in 1980, and then the lessons you can draw as things have changed and maybe what has changed or what changed as you looked at this from the 1992 perspective.

And that is--let me just throw in one other element. When we met with Richard Neustadt recently to discuss this book that he had done, he mentioned that really the one thing he regrets, the biggest damn fool mistake he ever made in 1960 was to recommend to President Kennedy the passage of what became the Transitions Act, which has now morphed into a process where $35 million or $40 million goes into this formal process, taking over a huge office building, teams and armies going out and writing 500, 600, 700 page reports on every agency. Most of which does not get read by anybody who matters and which doesn't necessarily contribute to an effective transition. Factor that into this process. Maybe we ought to just get rid of that.

Harrison?

MR. WELLFORD: Well, I have had the experience of transitioning in '76, out in '80. Advising unsuccessful democratic candidates in '84 and '88, and then transitioning in in '92. So I can say that over three decades I've had the privilege of having my advice mangled, bungled, and ignored. And given the fact that the two transition ins have been stigmatized here as not huge successes--I guess I'm pretty glad about that--but service, service in any transition, in or out, is a great privilege. And I'm sure that all of us here feel very grateful for having been part of it. I mean, I will never, ever get over my sense of privilege and gratitude for being able to serve my country in that very peculiar environment.

And one thing that we haven't said here, but it is probably implicit, is how unique a phenomenon the American Presidential transition is. No other country has anything like it. In parliamentary democracies, when they have a change in government, only a few people at the very top of the government change hands. But here we have a wholesale shift, a wholesale change in the policy superstructure of hundreds of agencies and departments in our government. 3,500 key people have to be appointed by the new President personally. 1,000 of them have to be confirmed by the Senate. So the shear magnitude of this change is something that I think we, we tend to take for granted. Because if you think about it, succession crises are a phenomenon of governments all over the world.

We don't have succession crises in this country. Except for 1876, we haven't had any challenge to the legitimacy of a new President. That's something to be very proud of. It doesn't happen by accident. It happens because after an election, even though you have people going out and people going in who have been at each other's throats in a bitter campaign, they tend to put those partisan actions aside and begin to work together on behalf of the greater public interest. And it's a very exciting and magnificent thing to be a part of. So with that little footnote to what's been said before.

Let me deal with the potential dangers that any transition has to face. I have often thought about an appropriate metaphor for an outgoing President. I think if you think of an outgoing President's authority like a large balloon with a slow leak. He's got all of the authority constitutionally there, but you've got all these forces making little pin pricks in the balloon. You've got the incoming team that naturally wants to, first, stop the political appointees from burrowing into the civil service. You want to stop the midnight Executive Orders, the last minute issuance of regulations, the kinds of things that will tie the hands of the new team, the perfectly natural concerns that any incoming team would have. And then there's all of that pressure to comment or get involved in some way with the foreign policy, as we've all heard, why it's a very good idea for excessive restraint to be, to be applied there.

But then from the sense of the--from the outgoing team, the President's people, the people who have to still run the government during this time, they have their eyes on something entirely different. They are thinking about their next job. They're polishing their resume. They don't want to be bothered with the day-to-day task of government. And, yet, government doesn't stop. The world doesn't go into a pause mode for Presidential transition. So it is a very peculiar, delicate area.

And I've been asked to think about what has, what makes for good transitions and what makes for transitions that are not so good. Let me comment on four or five things, all of which have been mentioned one way or another already. That's one of the advantages or disadvantages, I guess, of coming late. But I want to give special emphasis to some of these based on my own experience and try to comment on some of the questions that were posed a few minutes ago.

The emphasis on planning early, absolutely critical. No doubt about it. How could you possibly make all those appointments, get ready for a submission of a budget, prepare your inaugural address, get your policy agenda clarified and streamlined and disciplined and not have done anything before the Wednesday after the, the election victory? You can't do it. I mean, 75 days just isn't enough time.

So sensible early planning is an absolute must. And for the most part, it's been done very, very badly. President Carter attempted to do a more elaborate, thorough, disciplined planning process than any previous Democrat had done. And good people were brought in, present company excepted, and there was, I thought, the prospect of those major tasks that I just mentioned, very good preparation. However, you had a planning staff that coexists with a campaign staff. The campaign staff is out there winning the war. There is always, naturally a suspicion that the planning staff while sitting back, working out devious strategies to steal the spoils of victory from the people who are on the front lines fighting the battle every day. And managing that tension between campaign and planners is so difficult, really, really hard for, certainly for Democrats. And I just say that Ed Meese did a brilliant job with that, the way he managed to keep both planners and campaigners on the same page is something that Democrats can only aspire to.

But in 1992 I saw the same thing happen all over again. We had a team that began to meet in Rhode Island, great secrecy, in June of '92. Bob Rubin, Bob White, a group of people that became critical to the Administration later on, met day after day putting together an elaborate critique of the Bush budget and a proposal for a new budget. A lot of work on key appointments, trying to get the domestic policy focused clear, and so forth. Never leaked out. There was never a single word in the press about it, which we were all very, very proud. Only seven of us were doing it. And we thought that we had a really great package of advice to give the new President if he--well, to give Clinton if he became the new President.

What happened was that the head of our planning team was Mickey Kantor. Mickey Kantor had a falling out with the campaign team and so the package of advice that we'd all worked on so hard had a stigma put on it by the campaign team from the first moment that it was presented to the President-elect. And while much of it was still used in one way or another, there was never that sense of cooperation and teamwork that's necessary to make a good result from the pre-election planning process. Hopefully, we've learned from all of this and the next time the conflict, this tension that I mentioned, can be managed in a better way.

In any case, let me go to the next point. Hubris, pride, it's so natural. This euphoria that you have of winning. You come in the next day, you know, you're Superman. Everything is possible. You can't--nothing, nothing can be denied to you. And you see that in the, in some of the stylistic goofs that people make like Ken Jordan wearing blue jeans and boots and putting his feet up on the, on the table in the Roosevelt Room. Some of the Clinton, some of Hillary's friends bouncing up and down on the bed of the Lincoln bedroom in their exuberance about having been elected. I mean, those are stylistic issues which are, you can criticize them. But they're not nearly as important as what hubris does to the substance of things. And that is the sense that we won, you lost, therefore, we're smart and we have nothing to learn from the outgoing team. This failure to take advantage of the institutional memory in the White House in the Executive Office of the President, to fully employ the extraordinary resources of the OMB, for example, in helping you get a grip on your new job, this unnecessary suspicion between the Department of Civil Service and the new political teams coming in, what a waste. And I've seen it too many times. It's, it's a real disappointment that we still have that kind of problem, but we do.

The outgoing team wants to be helpful. They're proud of what they've done. They have a sense of patriotism about the institution of the Presidency. And they want to make the new team as successful as possible. Sometimes those relationships work well. But often they don't realize their potential because of this attitude that I've talked about.

Another element of hubris is the kind of people that are appointed. What corporation would ever think that someone who was a deputy assistant collector of fire ants in the Department of Agriculture in Georgia could be ready to be ready to be promoted to the Deputy Assistant to the President of the United States. But those kinds of things happen all the time. You have this, this tendency to appoint people for whom the White House job is a quantum leap in prestige and influence. And you do it because they're loyal, because you're comfortable with them, and you're not thinking ahead a